"AFj's PhD" blog was created in 2004 to report on-line the PhD work of Alfredo Ferreira (Jr). After finishing his PhD in July 2009, the posting was suspended.

However, after several requests, the blog was reactivated in October 2010."AFj's PhD and after" blog will provide information on Alfredo Ferreira's work as a researcher in INESC-ID and his activities as a Assistant Professor at IST/TULisbon.

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Backing Up MSDN CD's

Today I need to return the MSDN CD's with Visual Studio .NET and libraries to IST computer and network services (CIIST). Thus, I decided to make a backup copy in order to have some indepence from the CIIST when the MSDN disks are necessary to install or update something in my computer, which occurs frequently.

I get some empty CD's and started the copy proccess. However, despite my attempts to write at the maximum recording speed (48×), the writing took always about twenty minutes by CD. When I verified the writing speed I noticed that it were 4×.

During the duplication of the last CD, I started labeling the new discs. Then I discovered why the copy was taking so much time. Instead of CD-R discs, I am using CD-RW discs "compatible 1×, 2× & 4×". Damn!!! How can such detail get unnoticed!?

Conclusion: a task that should take a few minutes, consumed more than one hour plus the time I spent trying to "fix" the problem. At least I made some bibliographic research while backing up the CD's.